Former Israeli military intelligence research chief reveals startling extent of transfers from PA budget to terrorists and the families of terrorists killed while carrying out terror attacks against Israelis

The Palestinian Authority has paid out some NIS 4 billion—or $1.12 billion—over the past four years to terrorists and the families of terrorists who were killed while carrying out terror attacks. Anyone who has sat in prison for more than 30 years gets NIS 12,000 ($3,360) per month, nearly 10 times the average salary the PA pays employees. The Palestinians’ own budgetary documents clearly state that these payments to the Terrorists are salaries and not welfare payments. When terrorists are released, they get a grant and are promised a job at the Palestinian Authority. They also receive a military rank that’s determined according to the number of years they’ve served in jail.

People say, “Okay, we know that they pay salaries to terrorists,” but we have not properly understood the scale or significance of this practice. The money that the Palestinian Authority pays to reward terrorists now amounts to seven percent of the PA’s approximately annual $4 billion dollar budget. Over 20 percent of the annual foreign financial aid that the PA receives is now dedicated to the salaries of imprisoned terrorists as well as to the salaries of prisoners who are released from prison. Released Palestinian terrorists continue to receive salaries for terrorism, as do the families of those who died in their “struggle against Zionism.” The total payment was roughly 1.5 billion shekels for fiscal year of 2016.

This is hardly a unique occurrence. Every year, the PA has released a similar sum, roughly over one billion shekels (approx. $320 million dollars) per year for the past four years. I’m only providing the past four years as an example, but if we went back further, we would see that the number has also been higher than one billion. Due to international pressure, the Palestinian Authority decided that it was unable to directly pay the money, and so from its budget, through a trick that satisfied many international entities, they transferred the money, not directly to a ministry responsible for payments to prisoners, but to the PLO so that the terrorists’ salaries could be formally paid through Palestinian National Fund, which was declared afterward by the Israeli Ministry of Defense to be a terror-supporting organization. But this money all comes from the Palestinian Authority’s own budget.

The PA’s official support of terror is a deliberate and official act of state: It occurs on the basis of PA laws that have been passed since 2004, and provide legal grounds for payments to incarcerated terrorists and the families of Terrorist killed carrying out terror attacks against Israel. These are explicit PA laws, which mandate payments to prisoners of war, or as they call them “al-asra”; a normal prisoner is “sijir” in Arabic. “Prisoners of war and released prisoners of war,” says the second clause of the law, “are an inseparable part from the fighting sector of Palestinian society.” On that basis, the PA has determines that Palestinian terrorists are entitled to “heroic treatment and recognition.”

Thursday, May 18, 2017

In spite of having been raised Catholic I have always had a very hard
time relating to Christianity. But as a hippie I've read the works of
various philosophers and theologians as well as both the Bible and
various works of mythology.

Seems like most religions that have
made it to the modern age have an element of behavior towards others at
their core. I haven't come across one that really teaches lie to
everyone and abuse your fellow humans. Thou shall not steal or commit
murder seem pretty basic and universal. The sort of thing one shouldn't
need to have a God tell them: "Don't do this."

I always thought that how one behaves and especially how one treats others was an important part of morality.

Imagine
my surprise over the last 20-30 years or so and the rise of the New
Evangelical Christians for whom proclaiming their faith (what ever the
fuck that means) is all important and as long as you do that it doesn't
matter if you are a lying thief who abuses and even murders people.
Because you proclaim your love of Jesus all is supposed to be forgiven.

Lately
I've been reading about the history of Judaism. We owe much of what we
think of as ethic, humanism and even Christianity to the often murdered
and abused Jews.

It may come as a shock to many but Jesus was a
Jew. Much of his message came from Judaism and the teachings of Rabbis
such as Hillel.

Maybe if people are going to call themselves
Christians it would highly behoove them to try to actually act more like
someone who follows the teachings of Jesus instead of running around
proclaiming, while shrouded in ignorance and pompously abusing your
fellow human beings.Maybe if Christians acted more like
Christians instead of pretentious bullies people would respect them and
their commitment to their religion more.

I
don’t want to sound like Dot Cotton, because this is meant to be a
secular country, and the church is not solely responsible for, or the
only wellspring of, moral values. We atheists also should, and do, have
moral values, I promise you. And like anyone else, we succumb to evil,
which I did yesterday, by feeling a tiny but immoral spark of joy when I
heard that cybercrime is becoming a threat to superyachts and their increasingly boastful owners. “Ha ha,” I thought, viciously. “Serves them right.” And I can’t even pray for forgiveness.

Since
Evangelical Christianity began infiltrating politics, officially in the
late 1970s, there has been a disturbing trend to limit or remove rights
from those who don’t meet the conservative idea of an American. Many of
these initiatives come in the form of “religious freedom” laws, which
empower discrimination, while other legislation targets immigrants who
believe differently. The result has been a sharp division in American
culture, and the redefinition of Christian theology.

Evangelical speaker, author, and university professor, Tony Campolo, said
Christianity was redefined in the mid-70s by positions of “pro-life”
and opposing gay marriage. “Suddenly theology fell to the background,”
he said. And somewhere in the middle of all the change, Evangelical
Christianity crossed the line of faith and belief to hatred and abuse.
Those who cruelly implement the actions of their faith are oblivious to
the destruction they cause to their religion, or the people their
beliefs impact. Is it fair to call it sociopathic?

Psychology Today
listed sixteen characteristics of sociopathic behaviors, which include:
Untruthfulness and insincerity, superficial charm and good
intelligence, lack of remorse or shame, poor judgment and failure to
learn by experience, pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love,
unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations, specific loss of
insight, and general poverty in major affective reactions (in other
words, appropriate emotional responses).

We see examples of these kinds of behaviors in church leaders and followers. Franklin Graham, for example, stated that immigration was “not a Bible issue.” His stand fits well with his conservative politics and vocal support of Donald Trump,
but his callousness toward immigrants and those seeking asylum in the
United States goes against everything he says he believes (Lev.
19:33-34, Mark 12:30-31). Yet, Graham doesn’t see one bit of irony
between his political stance and his religious belief. Nor does he seem
to notice the horrific casualties in war-torn countries these immigrants
are desperately trying to flee.

Pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento said
after the Orlando, Florida terrorist attack on a gay nightclub, “The
tragedy is that more of them didn’t die. The tragedy is — I’m kind of
upset that he didn’t finish the job!” This “minister of God” showed no
compassion for the families of the men and women who died. He appeared
incapable of laying aside his religious beliefs for even a moment of
shared human connection to a tragic event.

And recently, Kim Higginbotham, a minister’s wife and teacher with a master’s degree in special education, according to her website, wrote a public blog called “Giving Your Child to the Devil.”
She claimed, “Being a disciple of Jesus demands our relationship to him
be greater than our relationship to our own family, even our own
children.” She listed Matthew 10:37 as justification, which says,
“Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of
me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of
me.”

In
a self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, martyr’s rant, she claims her son
turned his back on God, and she was left with no other option but to
abandon him. It turns out her son is gay and - it turns out - the day
the diatribe was posted was his wedding day. Sharon Hambrick, a
Christian writer, posted a wonderful response to this mom.

But
mostly, rather than calling these people out for sociopathic behavior
fellow Christians agree. Many of the comments on Higginbotham’s website
say, “So sorry for your loss,” or, “Praying for you and your son.”

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

From Robert Reich:http://robertreich.org/post/160651192690Robert ReichMay 14, 2017The
question is no longer whether there are grounds to impeach Donald
Trump. It is when enough Republicans will put their loyalty to America
ahead of their loyalty to their party.

Trump’s statements last
week about his firing of former FBI director James Comey provide ample
evidence that Trump engaged in an obstruction of justice – a major
charge in impeachment proceedings brought against Richard M. Nixon and
Bill Clinton.

It’s worth recalling that the illegality underlying
Nixon’s impeachment was a burglary at the Watergate complex, while the
illegality underlying Clinton’s was lying to a grand jury about sex with
an intern in the White House.

Trump’s obstruction is potentially
far more serious. It involves an investigation about whether Trump or
his aides colluded with Russia in rigging a presidential election – the
most direct assault on American democracy in history,

Last
Thursday, in an interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt about his firing
of Comey, Trump said: “I was going to fire regardless of
recommendation.” Trump also said that he had pressed Comey during a
private dinner to tell him if he was under investigation.

Trump
conceded that the ongoing investigation into Russian influence on the
2016 election, which includes a probe into the possibility that Moscow
was coordinating with the Trump campaign, was one of the factors Trump
considered before firing Comey.

“In fact, when I decided to just
do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump
and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for
having lost an election that they should have won,’ ” Trump said.

The
law is reasonably clear. If Trump removed Comey to avoid being
investigated, that’s an obstruction of justice – an impeachable offense.

New order will likely grant broad rights to refuse service or jobs to LGBT people or women who have had abortions

The
religious right boosted the thrice-married, porn-loving, pussy-grabbing
Donald Trump into the White House and now it appears they are going to
get paid. Politico has reported that on Thursday,
which is the National Day of Prayer, Trump will likely sign a
“religious liberty” executive order intended to grant broad rights to
religious conservatives to discriminate against LGBT people and women
perceived to be sexually immoral.

The scare quotes around “religious liberty” are deliberate. If this executive order is anything like the one leaked to The Nation in February,
then it has nothing to do with religious liberty, as the term is
commonly understood. In fact, the leaked executive order seems to
violate the First Amendment, in that it privileges one set of religious
beliefs — those of fundamentalist Christians — over all others.The
original draft of the executive order covered “any organization,
including closely held for-profit corporations” or any individuals “when
providing social services, education, or healthcare; earning a living,
seeking a job, or employing others; receiving government grants or
contracts; or otherwise participating in the marketplace, the public
square, or interfacing with Federal, State or local governments.”

This
broad category of people would be allowed to discriminate, under the
guise of religion, against LGBT people or women who want or have used
reproductive health services, such as abortion or some forms of
contraception. Sarah Posner of The Nation explained:

Language
in the draft document specifically protects the tax-exempt status of
any organization that “believes, speaks, or acts (or declines to act) in
accordance with the belief that marriage is or should be recognized as
the union of one man and one woman, sexual relations are properly
reserved for such a marriage, male and female and their equivalents
refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively
determined by anatomy, physiology, or genetics at or before birth, and
that human life begins at conception and merits protection at all stages
of life.”

“This isn’t about religious liberty at all,” said Camilla Taylor, senior counsel for Lambda Legal,
in a phone interview. “It’s a thinly veiled assault on LGBT people and
anyone who needs reproductive health care,” said Taylor, referring to
the draft order that had been leaked in February.

t’s possible,
and even likely, that the White House has tried to update the new
executive order in the hopes that it will be stand up to a court
challenge. But that’s a move that’s been seen before from this
administration when it came to assaults on First Amendment rights. When
it was clear that Trump’s first “Muslim travel ban,” which was clearly
an attempt to discriminate against people based on religious beliefs,
would fail in court, the administration slapped together a new one with a
few tweaks meant to make the bigotry less overt. Trump’s second travel
ban does not seem to be passing muster in the courts either, though the matter is still in litigation.

For those who claim that Donald Trump has been pasteurized and homogenized by the presidency, his sour, 100th-day speech in Harrisburg, Pa., was inconvenient.

Trump used his high office to pursue divisive grudges (Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer is a “bad leader”),
to attack the media (composed of “incompetent, dishonest people”) and
to savage congressional Democrats (“they don’t mind drugs pouring in”).
Most of all, Trump used his bully pulpit quite literally, devoting about
half his speech to the dehumanization of migrants and refugees as
criminals, infiltrators and terrorists. Trump gained a kind of perverse
energy from the rolling waves of hatred, culminating in the reading of
racist song lyrics comparing his targets to vermin. It was a speech
with all the logic, elevation and public purpose of a stink bomb.

On
a selection of policy issues (Chinese currency manipulation, NATO, the
North American Free Trade Agreement), Trump has been forced to
accommodate reality. But those who find the president surprisingly
“conventional” must somehow dismiss or discount this kind of speech,
which George Wallace would have gladly given as president. They must
somehow ignore the children in the audience, soaking up the fears and
prejudices of their elders. They must somehow believe that presidential
rhetoric — capable of elevating a country — has no power to debase it.

It
is not sophisticated or worldly-wise to become inured to bigotry. The
only thing more frightening than Trump’s speech — arguably the most
hate-filled presidential communication in modern history — is the
apathetic response of those who should know better.

For vigorous
and insightful criticism of Trump, we should turn to someone who is not
an American at all. He is a Czech intellectual, playwright and
politician — who also happens to be dead.I viewed Trump’s speech immediately after reading Vaclav Havel’s essay “Politics, Morality and Civility” (in an edition
recently issued by the Trinity Forum). Havel surveyed the
post-communist politics of his time and found leaders willing “to gain
the favor of a confused electorate by offering a colorful range of
attractive nonsense.” Sound familiar? His diagnosis continues: “Making
the most of this situation, some characters with suspicious backgrounds
have been gaining popular favor with ideas such as, for instance, the
need to throw the entire government into the Vltava River.”

The
great temptation, in Havel’s view, is for people to conclude that
politics can’t be better — that it “is chiefly the manipulation of power
and public opinion, and that morality has no place in it.” This
demoralized view of politics would mean losing “the idea that the world
might actually be changed by the force of truth, the power of a truthful
word, the strength of a free spirit, conscience and responsibility.”

“Genuine
politics,” argues Havel, “is simply a matter of serving those around
us; serving the community, and serving those who will come after us.”
And this responsibility grows out of a moral and spiritual reality.
“Genuine conscience and genuine responsibility are always, in the end,
explicable only as an expression of the silent assumption that we are
observed ‘from above,’ that everything is visible, nothing is
forgotten.”

For
getting a sense of what Americans think, decent polls, for all their
deficiencies, are better than wild guesses. So consider the findings of a major poll that last month looked into the question of whom to believe, Trump or the major media. It ain’t pretty.

First
of all, how many Americans think that media are responsible for “fake
news”? According to this poll, commissioned from Langer Research
Associates by ABC News/The Washington Post, 52 percent of Americans think that news organizations “regularly” produce false stories. Regularly.True,
that’s not as big a number as the 59 percent of the same sample who
think the Trump administration “regularly” makes false claims. Even
factoring in the poll’s sampling error, the news organizations would
seem to be slightly — but only slightly — more credible than the White
House falsehood machine. How much of a victory is that?

Curiously,
40 percent of the same sample think that it’s a bigger problem that
mainstream news organizations produce false stories than that the Trump
administration makes false claims. Forty-three percent think it’s the
other way round. Eleven percent think they’re equally at fault. Allowing
for the sampling error, it’s a wash. Small comfort for media, I’d say.

Another poll
(which asks about “national political media,” not “news organizations,”
but such are the vagaries of the disorderly polling business), gives a
result even less flattering to the news media as a whole:

Trump’s
critiques of the media, which he commonly derides as “fake news” also
seems to have struck a chord with Americans. A plurality (42 percent)
said they see fake news in national newspapers or network news
broadcasts more than once or about once a day. About 3 in 10 (31
percent) said they saw fake news from those sources once every few days,
once a week or slightly less often than that.

Another poll, this one by The Economist/Yougov in February, asked the question more pointedly, and found a more dramatic tilt toward media over Trump. Their question was:

“When
the media challenges Donald Trump about whether things he and his
Administration say are correct, or not correct, do you feel… (A) Trump
and the Administration usually turn out to be right on the facts; (B)
The media usually turns out to be right on the facts; (C) Not sure.”

Neither
poll specified which news organizations the pollsters were asking
about. That’s a serious deficiency. Presumably, respondents were welcome
to include, among “news organizations,” Fox, Breitbart, Infowars and other right-wing vehicles that I have been calling the Vortex
— VOices of RT-Wing EXtremism. So what are we entitled to conclude
about the state of national disbelief? To judge historical tendencies,
we have to resort some educated guesswork. So here goes.

It was in
1972 that Gallup started asking Americans how much “trust” (sometimes
“confidence”) they had in news media generally, which the pollster
sometimes labeled a bit more specifically as “newspapers, TV and radio.”
For 35 years, between 1972 and 2007,
the total of “great deal” and “fair amount” always stood at 50 percent
or higher. Other pollsters asked comparable questions, posing the
alternatives a bit differently: high, medium and low confidence. Between
1977 and 1983, the total of “high” and “medium” confidence soared as
high as 89 percent.

The
Archdiocese of Kansas City says it is severing its years-long
relationship with Girl Scouts in nearly two dozen Kansas counties
because the organization promotes materials "reflective of many of the
troubling trends in our secular culture."

"The decision to end our relationship with Girl Scouting was not an easy one," Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann said in a statement released Monday. He asked pastors to "begin the process of transitioning away from the hosting of parish Girl Scout troops."

Instead, he calls for chartering American Heritage Girls troops, which he describes as "based on Christian values." According to its website,
the organization was formed in 1995 by a former Girl Scouts volunteer
who was "uneasy with the way her troop was asked to handle matters of
faith."Now, local pastors will choose whether to end Girl Scout
programs immediately or "over the next several years, 'graduate' the
Scouts currently in the program."

Girl Scouts of the USA
identifies as a secular organization with ties to faith, and the
national organization and the Catholic Church have had a relationship that dates back a century.

A
few within the Church, instead of aligning with the Church Hierarchy's
positive position on Girl Scouts, have chosen to propagate
misinformation that the Catholic Church has acknowledged to be false,"
the Girl Scouts national organization said in a statement following the
archdiocese's announcement. "Girl Scouts is always willing to work with
any and every person or organization in order to fulfill our mission of
building girls of courage, confidence and character, who make the world a
better place."

Naumann said he is troubled by materials that
highlight the roles of women such as birth control activist Margaret
Sanger and feminist writers and activists Betty Friedan and Gloria
Steinem. A local representative of the Girl Scouts told NPR that these
women and many others have been celebrated because of their leadership
qualities.

The archbishop's letter also states that Girl Scouts of
the USA "contributes more than a million dollars each year to the World
Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGS), an organization
tied to International Planned Parenthood."

However, on its national website,
the Girl Scouts says it "does not have a relationship or partnership
with Planned Parenthood." The organization says it pays membership dues
to WAGGS and compares the relationship to the one between the U.S. and
the U.N.: "The United States may not agree with every position the UN
takes, but values having a seat at the table."

For
years, the Christian Right, abetted by some Orthodox Jewish allies, has
claimed that there’s a war on religion in America. Sometimes it’s the
“War on Christmas,” sometimes it’s alleged persecution of Christians for
practicing their faith, and sometimes it’s hard to articulate at all.

Well,
today, the president of the United States bought into that rhetoric,
and announced that he’s ending the war, signing an executive order that
was heavy on symbolism and light on substance. Trump’s order focused on
fake issues rather than real ones — good news for LGBTs and others who feared being targeted, but bad news for American Jews and other religious minorities.

On
the substantive side, the Jewish backers of the action didn’t get
anything they had wanted. No changes in funding for religious schools,
no religious exemptions to allow discrimination.

But what we all
got was an earful of gospel. In case there was any doubt about what
“religious liberty” really means in a country that is 70% Christian, the
audience in the Rose Garden got serenaded by Christian musician Steven
Curtis Chapman (one of his songs was a setting of the Lord’s Prayer) and
preached to by televangelist Paula White (who sells “resurrection
seeds” for $1,144).

Oh, and Rabbi Marvin Hier, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. For a change.

In
fact, the one substantive change of note will probably come back to
haunt American Jews. That was the effective repeal by Trump of the 1954
“Johnson Amendment,” which prohibits nonprofit organizations — including
religious ones – from political campaigning.

Critics had
characterized the Johnson Amendment as a gag order on pastors,
prohibiting them from preaching about politics. That’s hogwash.Not
only does the law not prohibit political sermons, it’s almost never
enforced against churches – the Washington Post hasn’t been found only
one investigation in the last 10 years.

But with the Johnson
Amendment gone (it’s still on the books, but Trump’s IRS will not
enforce it), pastors and rabbis and imams will be under more pressure to
be more explicitly political. That’s why most grassroots evangelical
pastors actually opposed the change. Can you imagine, now that the
gloves are off, rabbis endorsing American and Israeli political
candidates from the pulpit? Or being pressured to do so by their biggest
donors? It’s a disaster.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

MOSCOW — At the beginning of April, reports surfaced
that a crackdown on gay men was afoot in Chechnya, the small, turbulent
republic on the southern edge of the Russian Federation. According to
the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, more than 100 gay men
were rounded up by the police and brutalized in secret prisons, and at
least three of them were killed. Many remain in detention.

In fear and desperation, 75 people called in to
the Russian LGBT Network’s Chechnya hotline. Of these, 52 said they had
been victims of the recent violence, and 30 fled to Moscow where they
received help from L.G.B.T. activists.

“Once
they bring you there,” a survivor told me, referring to the secret
prison in Chechnya where he’d been detained, “they immediately start the
beatings and electrocutions, demanding information about who you were
dating.” The guards, he said, would spit in the prisoners’ faces, and
worse: “We were such hated creatures that each guard felt obliged to hit
us when passing by.”

This
persecution of gays is symptomatic of the repressive regime that now
runs Chechnya. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter-century
ago, that rugged outpost of the old empire has lived through separatist
agitation, terrorism and two bloody wars. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, some 5,000 are still missing, and its towns were left in ruins.

Chechnya’s
autocratic leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has enjoyed near unconditional
support from Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Kadyrov’s
father, Akhmad, started out as a separatist Islamic leader, but at the
beginning of Russia’s second military campaign against Chechen rebels,
which began in 1999, he swapped sides to support Moscow.

When
Akhmad Kadyrov was killed in a terrorist attack in 2004, his son took
his place, muscling out rival strongmen and monopolizing power in the
republic by placing his people in charge of federal institutions. Mr.
Kadyrov ensured that his fighters were integrated into the local police
force, largely preserving the command chains, and their violent skills
were deployed in heavy-handed counterterrorism operations on behalf of
the Kremlin.

In
2009, by the end of what was officially called “the counterterrorism
operation,” he had succeeded in suppressing the separatist insurgency
and consolidating his regime.
Loyalty to Moscow was rewarded with lavish federal funds to raise
Chechen towns from rubble and build shiny skyscrapers in the capital,
Grozny.

Collective
punishment is the hallmark of Mr. Kadyrov’s repression. Relatives of
those who displease the authorities are threatened, beaten, held
hostage, expelled from the republic or have their homes burned down.
Such methods were first applied to suspected rebels but have spread to
regime critics, religious dissenters, even drunken drivers. The same
techniques have now been applied to the families of men thought to be
gay, which are threatened with detention unless the suspects turn
themselves in to the police.

In this climate of humiliation and immense fear, Chechens are fleeing the Russian Federation en masse. Yet the Kremlin turns a blind eye to such excesses
in return for allegiance. Mr. Kadyrov calls himself a foot soldier for
Mr. Putin. Chechnya sends thousands of state employees, students and
schoolchildren into the streets to celebrate Russia Day, Mr. Putin’s
birthday and the annexation of Crimea. Chechen “volunteers” have fought
in Ukraine and in Syria, and Mr. Kadyrov regularly assails the West,
Russian liberals and the opposition. Above all, Mr. Kadyrov has pursued
the fight against separatism and Islamist insurgency.

Famed physicist Albert Einstein is the subject of a new series
produced by Ron Howard. The National Geographic Channel’s show depicts
the funny and controversial side of the “Genius” scientist who was known
for being silly and political as well as amorous.

According to a Daily Beast interview
with Howard, the first episode of the series breaks down the man who
became known as one of the world’s most well-known Jews to stand up
against the Nazis. Einstein ultimately ends up on a Nazi hit list and
the pilot episode opens with the assassination of one of his dearest
friends. The scene that follows it shows Einstein “shagging his
secretary,” Howard explained.

The team working on “Genius” was
keenly aware of the existing political problems scientists are facing
with conservatives, many of whom reject science on a number of issues
from climate to evolution and even basic biology. The second episode
finds Einstein and his wife trying to flee Nazi Germany but the U.S.’s
immigration policies block them. Einstein’s science was often dismissed
as “Jewish physics” by anti-Semites and detractors. The story follows
the couple as they come to the U.S. as a refugee.

“Those pressures
and threats on people and narrow-minded thinking and greed and
careerism around science and politicizing science and discovery—they’ve
never faded entirely,” Howard told the Daily Beast. “But it certainly
has not been lost on us that these issues are more up front and center,
and reemerging with a level of intensity that we haven’t seen in a long
time. It’s the U.S. but it’s also around the world. So those scenes in
episode one and in the series definitely carry with them more impact
than I think we expected when we began.”

Howard also wondered
openly about the ways in which the world would have been different if
Einstein had simply arrived in the U.S. and hidden from public view.
Instead, Einstein continued his anti-Nazi political activism and
continued doing his life’s work.

African
American women organizing shooting classes are finding a surge of
interest – and many say it comes down to feeling less safe in the era of
Trump

It
was a modest setting for the launch of a movement: 10 African American
women sat on folding metal chairs lining the edges of a small,
gray-carpeted room on the second floor of the Bullseye Indoor Range and
Gun Shop in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

They nervously giggled as Marchelle Tigner began her lesson. Seven of them had never held a gun before.

“This is a movement, and it starts now,” Tigner told her students. Heads nodded.

The
class was one of four scheduled back to back on 26 February, to meet
unexpected demand as dozens had responded to announcements on Facebook
for Tigner’s first Atlanta-area class for black women to learn to shoot.

micThe
movement, she said later, is no more and no less than “black women
learning how to shoot, and purchasing firearms”, and it’s happening in
cities across the country.

Tigner, who lives in Savannah, Georgia, sensed that there was pent-up demand when she launched Trigger Happy Firearm Instruction
in November. She found the Bullseye firing range near Atlanta and
offered the class through social media, hoping for 20 students. But the
class sold out in two days, so she expanded it to 40. Another class
scheduled for 4 March sold out to 40 students in 24 hours; a third class
for 30 on 18 March sold out in 30 hours; and so did a fourth on 19
March. Tigner’s now got classes scheduled through the end of May,
including several in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.She said she’s
surprised at the response her classes have received. “The growth of
these classes – I never expected it,” she said. “It shows me how unsafe
these women feel in their communities.”Meanwhile, in Cincinnati,
Tiffany Ware, 44 – founder of the Brown Girls Project, which offers
makeup workshops and other activities for building self-esteem in young
black girls – organized a group of black women for a firearms training
class on 18 December. The cap of 20 was quickly met; 45 signed up for a
waiting list. Another class was held a few weeks later. A waiting list
soon grew to more than 100, and now Ware organizes monthly classes.

In Dallas, the Black Women’s Defense League,
launched in 2015, has seen the number of black women signing up for
time at local shooting ranges at least double in the past 10 months or
so.“I can confirm that more African American women are learning to shoot,” said Kenn Blanchard, author of Black Man with a Gun,
a gun ownership manual. “I’m getting emails from places like
Pennsylvania, Arizona, saying: ‘Hey Kenn, these seven ladies were
shooting – look at their scores.’ That’s never happened before,” said
Blanchard, who’s based in Maryland.

I am tired of people pitting my identities against one another.

Linda
Sarsour, the Palestinian-American political activist, expressed back in
March how feminists need to care for Palestinian women, and alluded to
the sentiment that Zionism and feminism are incompatible. Sarsour said
to The Nation,
“It just doesn’t make any sense for someone to say, ‘Is there room for
people who support the state of Israel and do not criticize it in the
movement?’ There can’t be in feminism. You either stand up for the
rights of all women, including Palestinians, or none. There’s just no
way around it.”

Big Bang Theory actress and Orthodox Jew, Mayim Bialik, retaliated by writing an article for Grok Nation, which outlined how Sarsour’s statements were not only offensive, but also false. Bialik wrote on her Facebook page,
where she also apologized for making it seem as though Sarsour directly
said that Zionism and feminism are incompatible, “[The] conversation
surrounding Zionism finally went too far for me to keep my big mouth
shut.” Bialik vocalized her frustrations, and now I am following suit. I
am tired of the discrimination against my people and of activists, such
as Sarsour, who think they can pit my identity as both a Zionist and
feminist against each other.

The
headline-making feud between Sarsour and Bialik made me start to think
about the correlation between my feminism and my support of Israel.
Zionism is the belief that Jews have the right to a state, just as
feminism is the right to equality. But both definitions have been
shanghaied by anti-Semitic and misogynistic rhetoric. This is where I
realized that the ways in which people express anti-Zionism are very
much alike to sexism.

My
stances with Israel are not straightforward, because sociopolitical
realities are complex. As a liberal Zionist I do not support Likud or
Netanyau, just as I do not support Trump. But as a Jew, I was raised to
love my Jewish homeland and to appreciate it as the only true sanctuary
for my people. My view is further complicated because as an academic I
praise the country for being the only democracy in the Middle East. Most
importantly for me, as a feminist, I value Israel for its progressive
stances on women’s and LGBTQIA’s rights.

As
a Zionist and a feminist my stances have been relegated to black and
white understandings, leaving me a blank canvas for others to picture
me. Once people at my liberal arts college, Sarah Lawrence, discovered
the dark truth that I do not despise Israel, I was labeled as a
Zionist-extremist. Similarly, as a female, I am labeled as a slut or
prude, dumb or overbearing—the latter being when they realize I have a
brain. It is this labeling of my Zionism and of my womanhood that
reduces the beauty of belief to something ugly and untrue.

Beyond
the labels themselves, it is the mindset behind them that is
disturbing. It is as though they are created in a moral-complex vacuum,
which only spouts double standards but refuses to take in any insight.
If a woman speaks her mind she is considered angry, whereas a man is
deemed intelligent and forthright. Similarly, Israel is constantly under
threat of destruction by surrounding countries, but Israel is seen as
the Goliath perpetrator.

The
Israel-Palestine conflict cannot be reduced to good and evil. This is
not to relegate the human rights violations that have occurred, but to
contextualize them. We are dealing with Likud, a right-winged
government, and Hamas, a UN recognized terrorist regime. I am critical
of the government just as I am with most current countries. But Israel
is more than a government. It is a country that allows trans people into
the army, has Arab women representation in government, and maintains
women’s rights, such as education, in their legislature.

It is
absurd, especially when one looks to any country North, South, East, or
West of Israel and understands their human rights violations, that I am
told my feminism and Zionism are incompatible. Our allegiances should be
with the people—both Israeli and Palestinian—and not focused on
demonizing either, that is unless we demonize the entire Middle East for
their relatively greater human rights violations. People call Israel an
ethnic cleansing, apartheid state but Israel has a more diverse
population than its surrounding countries and, unlike South Africa
apartheid, has laws of nondiscrimination within its constitution. Yes,
racism exists within Israel, as it does in most parts of the world. But
singling out the Jewish State above the rest shows how these double
standards are a projection of anti-Semitism as opposed to true concern
for the people.

The
alt-right was key in getting Trump into power. But its strain of
misogyny differs in sometimes surprising ways to that of the traditional
Christian right

One hundred days on from Donald Trump entering the White House with its help, what will the alt-right
do next? The small, loosely organised movement, which has helped to
revitalise far-right politics in the United States, has made skilful use
of internet activism and has a receptive ear in Trump’s chief
strategist Steve Bannon, who as former head of Breitbart News once
proclaimed his network “the platform of the alt-right”. More than
shaping White House policy, however, the alt-right’s greatest impact may
come from its efforts to shift the political culture.

Although best known for its white nationalist brand
of racist ideology, there’s growing recognition that patriarchal
politics is also central to the movement. Several observers have pointed
out that the alt-right advocates not just white supremacy, but more
specifically white male supremacy, that the movement feeds on “toxic resentment of women”, and that sexism serves as a “gateway drug” pulling a lot of young men into it. The few alt-right women who have been profiled embrace their own subordination.

Missing
from these accounts is a recognition that the alt-right is reshaping
patriarchal politics. Its version of male supremacy is not just more
explicit or aggressive – it’s strikingly different from the version
that’s been dominant among US rightists for decades.

Consider
abortion. Some alt-rightists, unsurprisingly, argue that abortion is
simply immoral and should be banned. Yet many others in the movement
disagree – and for reasons that have nothing to do with respecting
women’s autonomy or privacy. These alt-rightists support legal abortion
because, they claim, it’s disproportionately used by black and Latina
women and, secondarily, because they see it as a way to weed out
“defective” white babies. In other words, they support abortion as a
form of eugenics. Both sides of this internal alt-right debate agree
that women have no business controlling their own bodies. As Greg
Johnson of the alt-right website Counter-Currents put it, “in a White
Nationalist society … some abortions should be forbidden, others should
be mandatory, but under no circumstances should they simply be a matter
of a woman’s choice”.

As far as I can tell, the only outsiders who
have responded to this discussion are Christian rightists. For decades
they’ve used the “black genocide” canard in an effort to smear abortion
rights proponents as racist; now they have some actual racists to go
after. But alt-rightists aren’t the least bit intimidated.

For 40 years, the Christian right
has been the benchmark of anti-feminist, patriarchal politics in the
United States. The Christian right was the first large-scale movement in
US history to put the reassertion of male dominance at the centre of
its programme. Since the 1970s, it has spearheaded a whole series of
patriarchal initiatives, from the campaign to defeat the Equal Rights
Amendment to the self-described “biblical patriarchy” movement, which tells women they have a sacred obligation to treat their husbands as “lord”.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson